Sun’s Open Source Spin Machine

Oh, well. You can’t please everyone, I suppose. I give up trying, too. I’m just too busy, to be honest, and there are too many people who are supportive and humble who need our attention. Anyway, check this out … in the second piece, Sun is “starting to feel like a parasite” and is “trying to feed off the movement” and is “certainly not trying to build relationships with the community.” Yikes. Sounds scary.

But seriously, I’m ok with people criticizing us — as long as the criticism is substantive. Besides, how else would we learn of we didn’t listen to all points of view? But when the criticism drops to this level of rhetoric, all credibility goes out the window. For me, it really is that simple. The more extreme language I hear the more my mind closes. And that’s sad because both of these pieces have some points that are thoughtful — perhaps I could even agree with some of them, I don’t know. But how can I have a conversation with a guy who calls me a parasite? I can’t. So, I toss the good points right in with the ugly stuff and dump all of it. But, since I always point to all the positive stuff people say about us, I try to also recognize the, ah, not so positive. 🙂 Enjoy.

Well all this OpenSolaris stuff is nice and that, but installing it is still a bit stupid (like trying to compile the java SDK). Anyone with a brain knows that you just put the files onto a bootable cd with an installer that runs after bootup and asks you a few questions and prepares the hard disk and writes the files to it and then reboots and you have your new system. Now Sun of course have to be difficult and insist on you signing up for a copy of Solaris Express which you then have to install and then download the Open Solaris. Now last time I looked Sun was a billion dollar company and the Knoppix guys are just a reasonably sized community and yet if you look at the installation procedures for the two different distributions you would think that the Knoppix guys were part of a trillion dollar company. So come on you Sun guys if you have so much in the bank and you are supposed to be so good then give us an Open Solaris live CD and a simple installation procedure and dont force us to sign up and we’ll give you the support you want. But if you just expect us to take the leavings while your paying customers get the so called luxury goods then I think you can forget about your community.
Michael.
(I’ll try any OS as long as its easy to install)

I’m not worried aobut either of these articles… neither have anything to do with OpenSolaris, and both come from authors who are completely unaware of wtf their talking about. Sun is involved in some massive FOSS projects, but this dumbshit picks on SSO? Big f’in’ deal.

Can’t the tech press find journalists (so called) that have any kind of experience at all?

The author has a web site. No indication he has any involvement with any open source community, which would account for why he says “community” instead of “communities” (other explanation: he’s a “Linux is the only open source” guy). I guess he’s not widely read enough to have noted that the SSO announcement is in the context of Jonathan Schwartz saying “it will all be open source one day”. I’m amused though that he thinks charging for support makes one faux-open. That spikes the game for pretty much everyone.

Jim,
There’s only one thing to say to a guy like that. It starts with F and end with U.Seriously.At the end of the day we all have to eat. From Fedora to OpenOffice, there is some commerical backing, or the author is leaning on paypal donations.You’re not a parasite, you’re a community builder.Perhaps Neil should be a part of community prior to calling it bogus.Open Solaris is the biggest thing to hit FOSS…ever.